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Additive manufacturing (AM) has the potential to revolutionize engineering because of its advantages in the product development phase. The revolution consists in the new approach of components’ design by function and no longer by manufacturability. This is the motivation driving authors to design and realize by additive manufacturing a new catalyst support for automotive exhausts which is no longer constrained by the industrial manufacturing methods and thus allows an optimized flow of the exhaust gasses. This work presents a new class of periodic cellular ceramic substrates. To authors’ knowledge this is the first time such kind of structures are employed in the automotive field. After a review the different ceramic AM techniques which are currently utilized in the production of highly complex ceramic architectures, the most suited one was selected and several samples were produced by AM. They were finally characterized via microscopic analysis (SEM, CT) compression tests revealing the best printing configuration for their mechanical behavior.

In comparison with metals and polymers, ceramics and/or carbon are more difficult to process into well‐defined cellular architectures (e.g., cubic, tetrakaidecadehron, etc.) using Additive Manufacturing techniques. The present work reports a simple method for generating complex and precise SiCN ceramic lattices using a preceramic polymer and applying the replica approach to structures fabricated using stereolithography of plastic materials, with the associated ease of fabrication. Three‐dimensional printed plastic lattices impregnated with a polysilazane were converted to SiCN by pyrolysis at 1000°C in inert atmosphere. In spite of the high amount of mass loss (~58%) and volume shrinkage (~65%), the impregnated structures did not collapse during pyrolysis, leading to highly porous (total porosity ~93 vol%) components possessing suitable strength for handling and potential use as lightweight components.

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